Kshitij Dhamanikar

Penguin Protocol Private payroll on Ethereum. Companies pay employees without exposing salary amounts or wallet addresses on-chain. The Problem Standard on-chain payroll leaks everything — sender, receiver, amount. Employees can be targeted, salaries compared, treasury movements tracked. How It Works Identity via ENS Companies own company.eth. When they onboard an employee, they mint a subdomain (alice.company.eth) directly to the employee's wallet using NameWrapper.setSubnodeRecord. No custom registry — ENS does the work. Authentication via SIWE Both parties sign in with their wallet (EIP-4361). Backend verifies the signature, checks ENS subdomain ownership against the database, issues a JWT. Contracts stored on Fileverse Salary terms are encrypted with both the company's and employee's public keys (ECIES), stored as a JSON blob inside a markdown file on Fileverse (pinned to IPFS). Only the two parties can decrypt. The employee decrypts by signing a deterministic message — no private key input needed. Private payroll via ShieldVault The vault holds USDC and maintains a MiMC Merkle tree. The company deposits a batch of commitments — each one encodes a salary note against a stealth address. The employee submits a ZK proof (Noir + Barretenberg UltraHonk) proving membership in the tree and receives USDC at a stealth address with no on-chain link to their identity. Why This Is Better | Without this | With this | |---|---| | Salary visible on-chain | Encrypted in IPFS, ZK proof to claim | | Employee wallet linked to payment | Stealth address, no on-chain link | | Custom employee registry | ENS subdomains | | Private key for decryption | Wallet signature derives key locally | | Single point of failure | BitGo treasury + private vault separated | Deployed (Base Sepolia) | Contract | Address | |---|---| | MockUSDC | 0x231E63e5E40E208D7570aaD33eF8a045d8EA4A3d | | HonkVerifier | 0xDA559F68d4D001E34a6ccDD55B2975E3eaD8d79B | | ShieldVault | 0x367707c3710514B196Bcf6bafE11977e264aa223 | ENS on Sepolia. Vault + ZK verification on Base Sepolia. Stack Next.js · RainbowKit/Wagmi · SIWE · ENS NameWrapper · Fileverse · Pinata/IPFS · Noir · Barretenberg · Solidity/Foundry · BitGo · Supabase